


i know no more

by Lvslie



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Anticipation, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Kissing, Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 18:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7945171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Had I once told you we could ever be like that, wouldn’t you have thought me delusional?</i><br/>Mortality, to the Doctor, is still quite a new concept.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i know no more

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I promise I’m still working on Blinking, but a part of this has been sitting in my drafts for ages and when I found out this week’s @timepetalsprompts is ‘eternity’ I found enough inspiration to write it out as well.  
> Disclaimer: Neither _Doctor Who_ nor Tennyson's _Immortality_ belong to me.

“You almost died.” A statement, an observation. 

She’s sitting on the edge of his bed — medical table — whatever the surface that he’s lying on really is, huddled somewhere by his knees. The light is dimmed and faintly blue, painting a smooth arch along her cheek. She’s long since looked this vulnerable, shoulders slouched and an almost rueful tinge of light in her half-closed eyes.

“But I’m alive,” he hears his own voice and it seems  _late_ , somehow, slowed down or perhaps just disembodied. Oddly contradictory, in any case, to what he’s telling her, “And almost dying, that’s ... no news to me, is it?”

She doesn’t as much as blink, but keeps looking at him, motionless and quiet, “S’different now. You know it.”

He can’t quite stand her gaze. His head feels heavy as he lets it fall back onto the pillow. Closing his eyes for a moment, he’s aware his new new heart speeding up, tackling a task that ought not be problematic at all, not to him. Different now — yes, definitely. 

“Yeah,” he whispers and, unable to resist any further, angles his head so that he can continue watching her.

“Is there a point to this?” Looking down now, onto her lap, she’s fidgeting slightly, trailing a finger absently over her other hand’s knuckles. “To living.  _Life_. I know it’s a ... a stupid question, really. Pseudo-psychology and all that. And sort of awfully naïve.” She frowns, winces slightly. “As though there could ever be a proper answer. But still. How do you think?”

He lets out a shaky breath. The anaesthetic has started to wear off, or perhaps he’s just subconsciously set, since waking up in a body preceding even this one, to become alert in her very presence — a deep-sealed algorithm to activate in Rose Tyler’s proximity and allow for the cautious perception of everything that she consists of and what it implies. 

Either way, he’s newly, rigidly conscious of his body and limbs — a milder echo of a regeneration twined with a burning reminder of the metacrisis. An awareness of the fact he’s bodily, vessel-bound and dependent on his flesh — almost painful but not quite. Not in a way he  _minds_.

Words come naturally, flowing in semi-coherrent syllables from his pliant, half-stiff lips and he’s hardly willing to stop them. “I’m not sure, I ... I  _think_ , if there is, then somehow, the point is that it does not end. Existence never stops, it’s eternal. Nothing can be dead for more than a second, nothing is  _ever_  really dead. And living ....  _we_  make up the Universe. We’ve made it all up and it exists.”

“The point of existence is to  _exist_.” She’s looking at him intently now, biting her lip. “That’s not an answer. That’s saying you’ve no idea what the point is.”

He raises one of his hands and runs it through his hair; a slow, dragged out motion. He’s irked and thrilled simultaneously by the amount of effort it takes. And still — so unnervingly aware of the weight of his own fingers; the frail structure of bones and strained muscle under the thin layer of skin. So  _brittle_ , all of this, so temporary.

“I ... yes. No.  _Well_ ,” he trips over his own words, can’t wrap his tongue around the vague, if substantial, idea of what he wants to tell her. And as always when it comes to this, language doesn’t feel quite sufficient, “I don’t technically  _know_. In this case, though, I’d wager a guess. Because I want ... I want to  _be_. More than that, I’m audacious enough to be thrown off by the thought of being alone. I want to be, but I want to be  _with you_. And I ... Can’t think of any reason for the Universe to let us, other than the fact that we create it.”

“ _I take the words. I scatter them in time and space_ ,” she mutters, voice muffled and hoarse and as eerily mellifluous as it is weary. He’s still unsure for how long she remembers. He’s never managed to ask and somehow, he does not think now’s the moment for it, either. 

Not when she’s so close and all of the sudden trailing her finger along the bone of  _his_  wrist, for a change, the contact leaving his skin tingling and him hardly daring breathe. Not when he can sense the light heaving of her chest and he can count her heartbeats, one by one, rushed and oh, so  _vibrant_ , and he is inexplicably soothed by this ability. 

“We’re the words?” Her fingers halt their way, lingering on his hand, and he can’t rationalise the tension that is suddenly washing away all the hazy weight of his being as his eyes catch hers in a fleeting moment.

“We’re the constant,” he breathes out, “us, the people, the planets, the ... the words, yes, as they are sounds, the light — it’s all the same, it’s  _matter_. We die, and new us are born or perhaps created, relentlessly, and essentially the same, because composed of the same stuff, steming from the same basic roots. Come to think of it, it’s someone’s last today, someone else’s first tomorrow."

His heart racing inexplicably in his chest, he inhales sharply, “We’re the same particles, the same energy. We ...  _I bring to life, I bring to death / the spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more_. Tennyson’s got it right, Rose. We’ve built and burned Pompeii. We’ve sunk low in the ocean, trapped in a moment of 1912. We’re existence, momentarily embodied in life.”

Her eyes, wary and devoid of their usual colour in this lousy lighting, are fixed on his face, as though assessing him. He wants to swallow but there’s not quite enough saliva in his throat. He wants to move, possibly touch her, find out, explicitly, what would it be like to yield to an instinct he’s long since had to fight; and more so, because the reason for fighting it is gone, gone  _forever_. 

But just then she ...  _laughs_ , a warm tickle of breath on his skin, tiny crinkles in the corners of her eyes. This lethal, disarming smile of hers. She leans back and he’s too caught up in the wish of analysis, of further  _understanding_  that he doesn’t stop her.

“That’s quite poetic,” she muses, “for someone who’s too dangerous to be left on his own.”

He cringes, remembering. Shakes his head slowly. “I might have been slightly overdramatic.”

 _“Slightly_.”

She adds nothing more, only half-smiling, inviting him to continue with his thought. Newly strengthened, most likely by a hardly justifiable rush of adrenaline in his veins, he props himself on his elbows and complies, quiet excitement surfacing in his voice.

“Because there is no death, is there? Not really. This moment will have always existed. This tiny splinter of life, tangled up together with another. Us,  _here_ , in this infirmary, on this table. It all passes, yes, but it has been. It will be. It’s all just the matter of perspective.”

“And then, what?” She gives him another ghost of a smile. “We realign? We still are, not as us. But somehow, rearranged.”

He can’t read her expression, again, and for a moment he’s crippled by the number of shields she’s learned to put up while he’s been gone. And ashamed to admit he’s been indulging in the exact reverse, losing them one by one without second thought, practically intoxicated by the process.

“Well, that’s the idea.” He tries to give her a smile in turn but fears it turns out rather forced.

“That’s a belief,” she corrects him softly. “That’s your idea of ... of an afterlife, sort of. Not a very idyllic one, mind you: losing any sense of self to serve as a ... source-code? Catalyst?” She lets out a small chuckle. “S’quite a noble concept, actually. Suits you.”

“ _Well_ ,” he drawls, leaning back and staring at the white-blue flicker of the ceiling, mildly frustrated by his own ungainly imprecision when it comes to words. “I wouldn’t call it noble, because it is, essentially, involuntary and independent from will. Plus, there’s not much believing to be put into something that is known for a fact to happen. I don’t think that’s what I  _believe_. I believe ... I guess a part of me still ...  _hopes_  something in me will remember having been me when I’m all but dissociated particles and a bit of dirt, for sure. But that  _is_  sort of delusional, don’t you think? That’s pushing it too far. I think I prefer to ... just be aware of what I have now and cherish it. No large-scale thinking. Perhaps I’m finally entitled to that.  _Carpe diem_ , Rose Tyler.”

Finally, entirely,  _frighteningly_  human. A burst of a nuclear weapon reduced to the  striking of a match.  And so much bliss in this.

She’s grinning now and he doesn’t understand why. “That’s exactly the sort of attitude I’ve never thought you could  _ever_  muster up, and yet here we are,” she observes. “And I ... I think you’re wrong to say it’s ...  _delusional_. That’s a harsh word. I think the Universe has been kind to us.”

Struck by the glaring inadequacy of this, he barks out a mirthless laugh, “Rose, if there is another pair of beings in this world as drastically  _unlucky_  as we have been then I honestly bow my head. And if there was something kind about it at all, I think we  _made_  it such.”

“No, but,” she bites her lip again, frowning, and her fingers find their way to the  fabric of his nightshirt, smoothing it idly all along the line of his sternum and further across his chest. In an instant, he’s reduced to square one, laughably tense and out of breath, the reaction to such a ... such an  _innocent_  touch far too complex and far too intense to be blamed on any anaesthetic drug. 

“Back where we started, we were, I dunno. Good together, yeah? Like you said, I made you better. Which was  _unlikely_ ,” she enunciates and he thinks he might have an idea where she’s going with that. 

 _Thinks_ , however, feels like quite a rich phrase to apply as he’s quite pathetically tangled in the loop of a sensation: her finger, drawing a smooth line along his collarbone. Analysis of any kind fails here, he admits mutely, there can be no understanding of the situation better than his racing heart and this burning sensation in his veins, limbs. He’s quiet.

“’Cause we were  _good_  but still sort of mutual anti-matter, like something that’d perhaps ... occasionally brush past one another an’ then flow on, unchanged. Like we weren’t meant to fit, and only accidentally did, and it was a sort of a flaw in the pattern.”

He stares at her: the fact that he can  _see_  the colour of her eyes is the doing of his memory alone; in this light he could only take a wild guess at the details of her face. But he has it memorized, down to every angle. If there’s any pattern at all that he knows by heart, it’s Rose Tyler’s skin, the prediction of her voice’s sound and the arch of movement.

“But look at us now,” she whispers and her breath hitches. For the first time a glorious thought occurs to him that she’s not  _quite_  as unaffected by this entire moment as he’s dreaded her to be. “We’re leveled.  _Joint_. Neither here nor there, two almosts. We’ve told the pattern to bugger off, an’ here we are: the cut-offs. Had I once told you we could ever be like that, wouldn’t you have thought me delusional?”

His sounds very quiet and very tense, when he replies, “Yeah.” 

He’s searching for a good word to categorize what he feels when he looks at her now. Awestruck, maybe, but there was nothing of a  _strike_  in this, no spontaneity. Continuously awed, perhaps. Thoroughly defeated.

Quite possibly, simply in love. 

She looks at him, and there’s some inexplicable sadness in her eyes that eludes him; doesn’t seem to fit the context at all. She looks away, down, onto her own hand still playing with his shirt’s fabric. 

“Sometimes I can’t help but think how much ... all this, y’know. How much it must terrify you.”

He’s looking at the muffled lights above, silent. She’s wrong and he’s focused on the frail mechanism of his own ragged breathing, the ridiculous amount of  _fuss_  it all takes, the complex combination of a synode, an impulse, a contraction. Over and over again. He’s thinking, idly, that he’ll never get used to this, would never want to. Slowly, an entirely involuntary smile stretches the muscles of his face — he can feel  _every one of them_ , pulling and wearing out, second by second. 

“If anything,” he says, “it makes me feel alive.”

She’s quiet for a moment and he can’t be sure, what with her head ducked like that, but he thinks she’s smiling, too. After a while, she exhales noisily and speaks up, an unexpectedly sweet and flippant note to her voice — for a moment she’s nineteen again, asking him to dance while he tries to  _resonate concrete_.

And bloody right in thinking it’s the wiser thing to do.

“I like the Universe,” she’s saying. “Maybe it’s glad. Maybe it appreciates it. Maybe it knows I like you, too.”

“Rose Tyler, what I’ve been trying to tell you is that you _are_ the Universe.”

She laughs again, scooting closer — lips brushing lips in a faintest of touches, and in that moment she  _is_ , because he can’t possibly imagine anything else to be still able to exist. Not when it would mean competing with the glorious fact of her, here, now. She owns this moment entirely, contains herself in it and just ...  _is_ , dizzyingly, and that’s more or less what he believes in.

He wants to tell her, but  _are there even words_?

Instead he lets his hands travel eagerly, the build-up of energy and anticipation almost too much to take, lets his mouth taste all this salty life he’s been granted and do what he thinks he can finally do, live, live without second thoughts,  _live_  —

“Well, then,” she whispers into his neck, “think I know a thing or two about being  _kind_  to aliens. One of them, specifically.”


End file.
